Losing weight is mostly a psychological game. Most diets will work, as long as you stick to them. The "sticking to things" is the hard part, because you're going to make mistakes, be inconvenienced, be uncomfortable, feel demotivated, and maybe even be embarrassed at times. None of those things have to do with losing weight, but we all have to go through them to some degree if we want to achieve success.
However, most people spend the majority of their time overcomplicating the actual process (i.e. complicated restrictive diet, complex workout routine, cold plunges, etc), and then just leaving the execution up to chance. Inevitably, this frequently leads to failure.
Instead, once you have the basics of a routine that will work, you should focus your attention on getting through the myriad mental barriers to success.
Sometimes we equate struggling mentally to "making more progress toward our goals", but that's not true. Struggling more than you need to mentally is just making it harder on yourself for no reason.
Here are a few heuristics that I have used to overcome my mental hurdles:
If you're a type-A person, or have any sort of ego, you may want to just dive into a particular diet or exercise routine with high intensity. You're motivated at first, and know that a more strict or intense routine is going to help you lose weight faster!
This is technically true, but remember that any routine you give up on is infinitely slow at achieving your goal. You'll never get there if you give up.
For most, just adding any routine to their lives is already a mental challenge, so don't make it extra hard on yourself by also making that routine hard to complete.
This is why you should start easy - walk around the block once a week, or drink an extra glass of water a day. Whatever it is, the most important thing is to come up with something you think would be easy to stick to regularly.
Once you have something easy, your goal at the beginning should be establishing a routine that moves you in the right direction. It doesn't have to be intense or efficient yet.
As you start to "put in the reps", you will start to gain confidence in yourself. You'll see that you can do this and will start to see some progress. Luckily, you'll probably see more progress than usual at first, in a phenomenon called "noob gains". As your body adapts, it will get harder to make forward progress, but by then your mind will be better disciplined and ready to handle that new challenge.
To recap, the strategy is to establish the smallest-possible postive qhabit, and then grow it slowly over time. This works like compounding interest - at first it's negligible growth, but you look at yourself 6 months later and are shocked with how far you've come.
Even if you're starting easy, you will make mistakes, so it's best to plan for them up-front.
As an example, you're probably going to have a day where you just go "off the rails" - you eat 2,000 more calories than your limit for whatever reason. Maybe you were drunk and partying, maybe you were depressed, etc.
That's pretty bad, but 2,000 additional calories is still less than 1 pound of energy (a pound of fat is 3,500 calories). As long as you get back to your diet the next day, you'll be fine.
In fact, if you imagine yourself looking back on your progress a year from now, and that one day was the biggest mistake you made, you would probably say you were extremely successful!
Therefore, instead of beating yourself up about the calories you ate yesterday (which you can't undo now), think about what you can do going forward to avoid it happening again.
For example, maybe you shouldn't own 30 pounds of chocolate in your house, or maybe you could set a rule to only have one beer in a night, or even just ensure you have a glass of water in between each beer. The key is to be light-hearted about it - you'll make more mistakes, and you'll still be fine as long as you don't quit.
Lastly, you probably want to ignore all the super-detailed cutting-edge health advice for how to lose fat, and do whatever activities work for you.
For example, I read about cold plunges, getting the right amino acids, and when to do high-intensity vs. low-intensity exercises based on your glycogen stores in the body. All the advice might be correct, but if I give up on my weight-loss goal because I can't handle sitting in an ice bath, I'm not going to succeed.
So instead, as long as you're following the basics of fat loss (eat a caloric deficit, and burn as many calories as you can handle), do whatever is easiest to execute for you.
Maybe that means you hate going to the gym, but enjoy going on long walks listening to podcasts. Great, do that! I went on a 10 mile walk a few days ago and apparently burned 2,400 calories - that's actually way more than I would have just going to the gym that day. I don't do that kind of walk every day, but I take advantage of it when I feel like it.
So practice listening to how you feel internally and what (positive) activities seem easy or fun, and which ones seem torturous. Try to avoid forcing yourself to do too many things; this may actually take a while to do if you're used to it (like most people).
You know you're weight-loss right if you can regularly find fun activities for yourself. Doing long walks while listening to a podcast (or just pondering in silence) is what's doing it for me right now. For you, it might be playing pick-up basketball with friends, or snowboarding, or swimming.
Make a game out of it and see how much progress you make effortlessly. You won't win any points for losing weight the hard way, so take advantage of your strengths!